Learning is Heavily Influenced by Brain Chemistry (Part 1)
Have you ever stressed out your class? Have you ever relaxed and calmed your audience? Have you ever initiated a classroom celebration of success? Do you organize social groupings within your class? Have you ever created a sense of urgency to spur groups to take action? If you can answer “Yes” to any of these questions, then you have influenced the brain chemistry of other people.
Everything you do as a teacher in some way influences the brains of your students. Recent scientific data supports the relationships between talking and changes in the brain, physical activity and changes in the brain, and learning strategies and changes in the brain.
What are states? How do they influence us all the time?
Just as the wind, sunshine, and moisture collectively form the complex atmospheric pattern we call weather, millions of neurons cooperate to form complex web-like signaling systems that represent the behaviors we call states. States create “weather” conditions in our brains at every moment. In your brain, weather usually changes every few seconds. Knowing today’s weather outside does not allow you to predict the weather very far in the future; knowing this moment’s brain weather or state does not help you predict future states more than a few moments in advance. Unlike the weather in the outside world, you have some control over the weather in your own brain.
States combine our emotional, cognitive and physical interactions to make all our decisions. If we put our learners into particular states, we can better orchestrate the conditions that will optimize their learning.
There are a few rules that guide the formation, stability and instability of states. They are as follows:
- States are like weather in your brain
- States run your life
- States regulate motivation
- States precede behaviors
- States are shifting neural networks
- States are always in motion
- States are self-organized
States are so strong, in fact, that we rarely unlearn anything. Instead, we create newer, more attractive states to enter (Grigsby & Stevens, 2000), which happens both consciously and unconsciously all the time. If you’re worried that this seems a lot like mind control, I have two things to say:
1) It is. (But we’re being paid to influence others minds.)
2) Most people need some initial support to manage their own states.
The long-term goal is to empower our students to manage their own states. Realizing this goal, though, takes a while. In the meantime, never feel guilty about successfully manipulating the states of others around you.
Highly adaptable and successful learner systems exhibit state continuity and state flexibility, or the ability to stay in the same state or change it at will. Intelligence building is enhanced by managing two key state variables:
1) Continuity – strength and persistence of previous, useful states
2) Flexibility – capacity for variability and responsiveness to context demands
For so many people, school and learning states are negative states because of their experience with frustration, boredom, anxiety or other negative factors. As educators, we should be helping our students turn their learning states into positive, states.
Commonalities attract people with common states. The primary emotions (states) are joy, fear, anger, disgust, surprise and sadness. These six emotions are a subset of all possible states and are the only states biologically “hard-wired” into the brain. With the exception of these hard-wired, emotional states, the expression of other states is culturally learned and far less stable.
Why should you bother managing states in others?
1) Learning is both the package and the process. Our role as teachers is to facilitate learning and you cannot separate the content of what you offer from the social environment it is offered within. They form a complex, unified “package” that is delivered to the learning brain. If you send a package through the mail, what is the most important part of the process? The answer is that the package and the delivery process are essential; one is useless without the other. Neither the process nor the package is valuable in itself. A teacher may deliver content, but unless the learning process is completed, the package is wasted.
2) The human brain is not generally designed to get things right the first time except in cases of trauma. We must get feedback from wrong answers so our brain can eliminate them from its bank of possible future answers. We don’t get smart by hearing or memorizing what someone else tells us. We get smart by eliminating poor choices through feedback-driven trial and error. Learning activities with high levels of both positive and negative feedback built into them further the learning process better any “sit and git” lecture. These activities include (but are not limited to):
Peer teaching
Brainstorming
Competition
Cooperative games
Team assignments
Checking work against a model
Peer editing
Discussion
3) The brain is designed to allow most learning to disappear from memory. Explicit learning and memory systems are governed by a “surge protector” know as the hippocampus. The hippocampus has a small capacity and can be easily overloaded. If content exceeds capacity, it simply “rewrites” new material over old material (Kelso, 1997). This protective rewriting process prevents a destabilization from massive amounts of irrelevant input (a “slow trauma”). So, the phrase to remember as teachers is: Too much, too fast won’t last.
4) Social interaction is mandatory for healthy and cognitively developed learners. After being separated from their peers, same sex companions show a marked and dangerous increase in cortisol levels (Levine et al., 1999). One way for teachers to address this issue is to strengthen social ties by cultivating academic aspects to social relationships rather than separating participants. Research supports:
Direct lecturing does not ensure accuracy. What you put into a learner’s brain is not necessarily remembered correctly or even at all!
Always mix up the media and mix up the partners. Multiple groupings and multiple methods will improve the accuracy of the information you are teaching.
Student feedback is crucial to social engagement.
Social climate influences our brain chemistry and activations which influence our mindset, safety and states which influence our cognition and joy of learning which influence our interest, motivation and recall.
5) State management empowers students. Almost everybody will say, “Yes!” to what you ask if they are in the right state.
If your students are in negative or counterproductive states, only negative behaviors are likely. If you take the time to put them in more positive states first, you’ve got a wide range of options available, and all of them are possible.
6) Learned helplessness causes depression (Alloy & Abrahamson, 1979). Physical activity can prevent behavioral depression and learned helplessness by acting on the serotonin circuits (Greenwood et al., 2003). This research supports the idea that, when done well, games, physical activities, recess and physical education can play a significant part in improving cognition in the school climate.
Ultimately our goal is to empower learners to manage their own states. First, teachers must learn to read learner states. Then they can empower students to recognize or read their own states. Some states are as follows:
Anticipation and Curiosity (“I’m hungry to learn”)
Leaning forward, eyes wide open, not blinking
Frustration, Distress, Tension (“I’m not getting what I need”)
Tightened jaw or neck, expressive foot or hand tapping, closed posture
Confusion, Feeling Lost (“I don’t get it”)
Head turned, wrinkled or furrowed brow, hand touching face
Ah-ha! self confidence, or celebration(“I got it!”)
Deep breaths, smiles, hand in the air, relaxed posture, sharing verbally with others
Boredom and Apathy (“I don’t care”)
Slumped posture, hunched shoulders, eyes glazed over, no focused expression
